NVIDIA Ion Reference PC Platform Deep Dive
High Level Synthetics - SANDRA
We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 test suite with NVIDIA's Ion reference PC platform (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and the Disk Storage tests). All of the scores reported below were taken with the Atom processor running at its default clock speed of 1.6GHz, with 2GB of DDR3-1066 system memory.
 |
|
We also set the Atom processor to either one or two cores enabled, essentially providing metrics for both Atom 230 and Atom 330 configurations.
In three of the four tests above, NVIDIA's Ion reference PC platform falls in line with competing Atom-based solutions that were powered by 1.6GHz N270 notebook variants of the Atom chip, though the Ion platform does show a very slight edge in spots. In the storage test, the 200GB Seagate Momentus 2.5" hard drive NVIDIA built our Ion test system with, is showing a slight edge as well. Conversely, on the memory bandwidth side of the equation, the Ion's DDR3 configuration we tested, with its higher CAS 8 latency settings, is coming up a tad short versus some of the DDR2 and Intel 945 Express-based Atom netbooks in our test group.
